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Continued from page 2

So if maximum entropy has made hardware, software and networks as relevant and commoditized as steel or cement, what’s a budding entrepreneur to do? The answer is to focus on ventures in one of two areas: either in the monetization of data, or in providing the infrastructure to enable the monetization of data. Period. Start-ups lacking a value proposition squarely in one of these areas face an arduous and unsatisfying trek along Sand Hill Road. Successful entrepreneurs explicitly need a Zen understanding of how data drives business value in their target market. Successful products explicitly need to be able to help extract the value buried in ever-larger quantities of data. And successful pricing models explicitly need to be founded on delivering value from the semantics of data. Period.

The magnitude of opportunities available to Big Data start-ups today far exceeds those that were available to technology start-ups at the Big Bang moments of the hardware, software and networking industries. This is abundantly clear from the successes of data-driven businesses, and the current spate of investment in Big Data start-ups. Who knew that the foundation of technology’s latest – and ultimate? – business model was being taught to you not in your undergraduate economics classes but in undergraduate physics instead?